They have been graced with an extravagant capacity to feel, a conduit to imaginative empathy, and it is their celestial duty to exercise this capacity, never to numb or ignore it. This is their operating philosophy. Moses has heard vegans make similar arguments about the human obligation toward nonhuman animals—if you have been endowed with consciousness, you must instrumentalize it to curtail the damage you inflict on the world—an attitude that Moses finds sympathetic but ultimately absurd. It is draining enough, he thinks, to summon compassion for the nonedible animals of this planet.
